Category Archives: Thoreau Quote

Cold Fridays (or Other Days of the Week)

Posted on February 13, 2015 by | 1 comment

By Corinne H. Smith

“Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen – Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl – drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, January 11, 1857

If you have visited Thoreau Farm, you can no doubt picture this scene. An assortment of family members and a few servants were huddled beside the large fireplace in our first-floor parlor. They had abandoned working in the kitchen in the salt-box shed attached to the back of the house. Outside the wind whipped across their fields. None of them knew how long they would have to stay here. And if they had to keep building “great fires,” perhaps we should feel fortunate today that they didn’t accidentally burn down the whole house back then.

Every region has its dramatic weather stories. For winter records, New England has the Blizzard of 1978, the Great Snows of 1717, and the Cold Friday of January 19, 1810. (Perhaps the Winter of 2014-2015 will get a fancy name and will be added to the list.)

Yes, that's cold.

Yes, that’s cold.

Thursday, January 18th, 1810 had been an unseasonably warm day. Some spots reported temperatures as high as the 50s and low 60s. But by sunset a line of snow squalls moved into western Massachusetts “with the power and fury of a tornado,” according to one source. “Desolation marked its course.”

Temperatures plummeted as the storm moved from west to east. By midnight, many thermometers were down to zero. On Friday, they dropped to -14, even -20. And those readings didn’t take what we call now wind chill into consideration. Wind velocities weren’t reported then, but they must have been catastrophic. The front brought a sustained “high wind, cold and piercing in the extreme, and of such force as to prostrate many trees and buildings.” Tree trunks were sheared off at various heights. The meeting house in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, was just one of the buildings that lost its roof. The wind and cold abated a bit by Monday, but the rest of January remained frigid.

Cold Friday was tragic enough that it was written about in town histories. In Woburn, Massachusetts, Joseph and Benjamin Brooks had gone to a nearby woodlot to chop wood that Thursday. On Saturday, they were found frozen to death. In Sanbornton, New Hampshire, Jeremiah Ellsworth’s house was torn apart by the wind. He pushed his way against the gale to a neighbor’s house for help, then returned to his own to rescue his wife and three children. The wind tore the children’s clothes right off their bodies. In spite of their best efforts, Jeremiah and his wife lost all three.

While other New Englanders dealt with dire losses of property and lives, the Dunbars and Minots and their friends stayed safe in this two-and-a-half story frame house we now call Thoreau Farm, built in 1730. According to entries in Henry Thoreau’s journal, members of his mother’s generation brought up memories of Cold Friday whenever the winter was particularly cold or snowy. Cynthia Dunbar had been 22 years old back then: still two years away from becoming Mrs. John Thoreau, and seven years away from giving birth to little David Henry.

As we in the Northeast hunker down to experience our own version of cold Friday, perhaps we can take inspiration from Cynthia and the people of Concord in 1810. They made it through the cold, and we can, too. Let’s hope ours isn’t one for the record books.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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Deeper Still – Digging Back into The Great Snow of 1717

Posted on February 9, 2015 by | 3 comments

I’ve just come in from hoisting more snow off the driveway and onto the banks along it. I use the word “hoisting,” because the usual dig-and-fling of shoveling won’t work anymore. Instead I’m now tossing snow back at the sky, which seems to underline the futility of the work.

8-foot tall blueberry bushes "innived" (left foreground)

8-foot tall blueberry bushes “innived” (left foreground)

Whenever Henry Thoreau wants to evoke wallowing snows and winter awe, he turns back to the Great Snow[s] of 1717. Then, in the very month of February, huge, wind-driven snows laid down Buffalonian depths that buried both houses and pastured animals. In “Winter Visitors,” he writes of “that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state”:

…whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family.

And a little earlier, at the end of “Housewarming,” he returns from being “exposed to the rudest blasts” to this thought:

It would be easy to cut their [humanity’s] threads anytime with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows, but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s existence on the globe.

Both moments in Walden point to the narrow span that we call “normal” and what waits outside it; they make his point amply. But for drifts of detail equal to the snows they describe, we go to his journal, where Thoreau, in turn, records an eyewitness account from Cotton Mather in a December letter from 1717. The letter begins with understatement:

On the twentieth of last February there came on a snow, which being added unto what had covered the ground a few days before, made a thicker mantle for our mother than what was usual.

Okay, we think, big storm atop prior snowfall; we’ve seen the like. But like our current winter with its more than 5 feet of snow for Boston in the past 17 days (ah, the recurring 17), there was more to come:

On the 24th day of the month comes Pelion upon Ossa [see mountainous imagery]: Another snow came on which almost buried the memory of the former, with a storm so famous that Heaven laid an interdict on the religious assemblies throughout the country…The Indians near an hundred years old affirm that their fathers never told them of anything that equalled it.

There follows vivid description of all sorts of snow-burials – cattle entombed, sheep too:

For no less than eight and twenty days after the storm, the people pulling out the ruins of above an hundred sheep out of a snow bank, which lay sixteen foot high, drifted over them, there was two found alive…A man had a couple of young hogs, which he gave over for dead, but on the 27th day after their burial, they made their way out of a snow bank, at the bottom of which they had found a little tansy to feed upon.

So, given this ’17 comparison, not so deep for us…yet. When last I checked, we still have “a little tansy to feed upon.” Still, there’s more winter to come.

Added note for those looking for winter words: Mather uses the word “innived” for those animals buried in snow. Just the word for our winter, I think – may your days be enlivened for being innived.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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SnowMoon

Posted on February 4, 2015 by | Comments Off on SnowMoon

“In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.” Journal, 2/5/55

SnowMoon Rising

SnowMoon Rising

During some winters, a sub-zero temperature is enough to draw me out – the snow that whines underfoot (even it offers cold complaint); the webbed nose hairs; the downright rarity of it all. Ah, then there’s our current winter, where the high temperature during a recent snow was 2 degrees. And last night, when February’s full moon, the SnowMoon, shone like a huge lamp in the white pines, it was 10 below, when I went out to try for a photograph of its deep blue shadows on our feet of snow.

Our SnowMoon follows early January’s Wolf Moon, which arrived when our ground was nearly bare (remember that?) and the winter felt decidedly unwolfy, a sort of Midatlantic compromise. No longer, of course; we seem into a winter that summons the mythic, and so the wolves are back, their ways lit by this moon in the pines. At least imagination suggested this as I squeaked over the snow and pointed my lens at the tree-framed SnowMoon.

My little camera, unsophisticatedly automatic, like much decision-making technology, caught little more than what looks like a wan light in a pitchy night, though it did amuse me by firing a weak flash of return light each time I pressed the button. All the blue shadows and pathways of pale light go missing in each frame.

Not the moon of story, but a SnowMoon nonetheless

Not the moon of story, but a SnowMoon nonetheless

Which left only the walk in the cold-crazed air.

Which is, I suppose, as it should be. All the better for listening and wondering:

“My, what a big moon you have.”

“All the better to summon the next snow.”

“And that faint, distant moaning sound?”

“It could be the wind. Or it could be the dogs of night, my dear. The very wolves.”

Ah, company of what once was for a night’s walk under the SnowMoon.

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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